By prayer, I do not just mean saying prayers or performing prayers of obligation but practising the deep prayer that leads onward beyond first beginnings into the mystic way. It is only here that we will come to know and experience the love that surpasses the understanding.
When the constitution on the liturgy was promulgated at the end of the Second Vatican Council, many were overjoyed because it did seem to embody a genuine modern representation of the liturgy that was so important to our early Christian forebears. I too was particularly delighted with this excellent document. But sadly, it was not followed by a further constitution detailing a modern representation of the early God-given mystical spirituality that I have tried to develop in this book.
The power and efficacy of the liturgy is the outward expression of the deep and daily prayerful spirituality of those who participate in it. Take this away and we are back in the world that Jesus came to transform, because the love on which it was originally founded is lost to sight. There was, however, one liturgist, the greatest of them all, who had an even deeper influence on liturgical reform than Dom Odo Casel OSB (1886– 1948), and my mentor, Pere Louis Bouyer (1913–2004). Let me quote then from perhaps the greatest liturgist of them all, the Jesuit, Josef Jungmann SJ, whose detailed scholarship dwarfed all others and whose words have apparently fallen on deaf ears.
In the present-day liturgical movement, primitive Christianity is often held up before our eyes as a model, an exemplar of liturgical observance. We are to believe that Christians of old, contrary to the tendency of modern individualism, knew no other, or scarcely any other form of prayer than liturgical prayer. Unfortunately, this ideal is not correct. The idea that the life of the primitive Christians revolved exclusively around the liturgy is not correct. And it cannot be correct, simply because it would be unnatural and in contradiction to the Gospels. How could the Christian life exclude private and personal prayer? It is a gross exaggeration to restrict the prayer of Christian antiquity to liturgical prayer alone.
In his many books on early Christian spirituality he goes on to explain how the early Christians like Christ himself, prayed at least five times a day. They prayed in the morning and evening and then at nine, twelve, and three o’clock, and even rose to pray at midnight. This was not just for vocal prayer, but for meditation too, on the life, death, and Resurrection of Christ, as he states quite clearly in his writings. This was of particular importance when later Christians who had never seen Christ personally, came to know and love him spiritually, and with the love developed there, to enter into him mystically, into his mystical body, thence into his mystical contemplation of God his Father. We have seen how, in the sweep of history, secular ideas and ideals have tended to infiltrate the spiritual ideals of Christianity.
In the early Church it was the ideas of the Hellenistic world that were to blame. At the Renaissance, those same ideas were once again at fault, as we have seen instanced by stoicism seeping into Catholic education thanks to John Colet. At the Enlightenment it was the enthronement of reason and reason alone, as the arbiter and measure of all things that were at fault, not just for its peremptory dismissal of mystical theology, but for inculcating the mindset that only an intellectual renewal could reform the Church. After the French Revolution it was communistic ideas and ideals that were thought to be the only bulwark against rampant authoritarianism and absolutism in its many forms. In this milieux the needs of the individual, of the personal, and of self-sought advancement were dubbed “bourgeois” and unworthy of a right-minded human being who should be totally dedicated to the common good, to the development of socialism or even communism.
Fr Jungmann refers to these ideas and “ideals” that had seeped into Catholicism in his time, through many of his “progressive” peers, many of whom like him, were so influential at the second Vatican Council. Although they were great intellectuals, theologians, scripture scholars, and liturgists, their antipathy to mystical theology received a further shot in the arm from the social idealism that had been understandably aggravated by their reaction to Fascism that flourished, both before and after the Second World War. They could not therefore be expected to see the necessity of, or emphasize, the importance of personal piety, or individual personal spiritual advancement, let alone the mystical prayer, which was still seen as an extraordinary way for the few, if it was a way at all. In short, although they were eager to reintroduce the ancient Catholic liturgy which was the “communal” expression of the whole, they were hardly likely to see the importance of, let alone introduce another document that for them seemed to emphasize the importance of the individual, the personal, and the mystical prayer, that was absent from their own spiritual education. The new liturgy was therefore doomed to fail as an instrument of renewal, without the inner dynamism that fired it in the early Church.
The early Christian liturgy was deeply inspiring, vibrant and spiritually re-energizing, not because it was rubrically correct in every detail, or verbally faultless, but because it depended on the daily personal prayer of the faithful. The early Christian sources like Fr. Joseph Jungmann SJ, make it quite clear that it was the practice of all Christians to pray, just as Jesus prayed with his disciples. And they would pray for more prolonged periods of time, just as Jesus did whenever and wherever he was able.
The omission of the Second Vatican Council to provide us all with a detailed modern presentation of the early spirituality of the first Christians, comparable to what they did for the liturgy, is quite simply the greatest ecclesiastical tragedy of modern times. A tragedy is when a good person or a great person, or even a good and great achievement is ruined by what might seem to be a small human failure or omission. This is what happened when an otherwise laudable Second Vatican Council that promised, and in fact gave so much, was sadly undermined by this serious omission. It was hardly noticeable at the time, for a whole Catholic population had come to believe that mystical prayer, if they had in fact heard about it, was an odd exceptional and eccentric way for a minority of “holy souls”. The truth of the matter is that it is the very essence of God’s great plan, called by St Paul the Mysterion. In this plan all are called to contemplation, as to their final destiny, conceived by God as their ultimate happiness, from all eternity.
It is not an eccentric idea to believe that God has called all to contemplate and then to enter into his glory to all eternity. That we should believe that it is, is to show just how far we have come from knowing and trying to live out in our daily lives the God-given spirituality that was the meat and drink of our first Christian forebears. The fact that the Council did not produce a document reinstating the profound mystical spirituality that prevailed at the dawn of the Christian era, left a gap that has in the intervening years been filled by secular forms of “spirituality”, if they can be called that. They have been drawn from the latest liberal pop-psychological and sociological fashions that are becoming more and more extreme with each passing day. Some of their frightening agendas from infanticide to sexual depravity, and even with theological agendas that seem more protestant than Catholic, have been taken up, not just by some of the laity, but among and between Priests, Bishops, and Cardinals from top to bottom in the Church.
This must alert us to the catastrophes that have already begun to afflict the barque of Peter. We must follow the teachings and the example of the great saints, mystics, and reformers to whom I have referred, who have kept the barque of Peter on course. If we wish to be guided by the Wisdom of God, then we will find it in Jesus Christ to whom we must turn in prayer, else we will be lost. External and visible reform in the Church must begin here and now with the clergy, most particularly in the seminaries and houses of religious education. If young men and women are asked to make a vow of chastity, without at the same time being taught how to come to know and experience the love of God, then disasters will follow because no one can live fully without love. If a person has had to forgo the experience of God’s love reaching out to them through another human being in the sacrament of love, then it is an obligation on those who insist on this sacrifice, to teach them how to come to know and experience God’s love in prayer, the prayer that leads to contemplation, or the disasters to which I have already referred will simply continue and become more and more widespread.
By prayer, I do not just mean saying prayers or performing prayers of obligation but practising the deep prayer that leads onward beyond first beginnings into the mystic way. It is only here that we will come to know and experience the love that surpasses the understanding. This is the love that was the making of the great saints, mystics, and prophets who we need today like never before. Mystical theology, as the foundation and completion of spiritual theology, must be taught by practitioners to all young men and women in seminaries and houses of further education. This is their right that must be granted to them by those who have placed on them the obligation to forfeit their natural desire to seek God’s love in and through the sacrament of marriage. If it is their right, then it is also the obligation of their superiors to teach them how to come to know and experience the love of God through profound mystical prayer. Failure to do this means that they, their superiors, are guilty of leaving them in a state in which they are perpetually in danger of serious sin, and traditional moral theology would call this a serious sin in itself.
Moral theology also teaches that those who place someone in that position are morally culpable, a culpability for which they will one day have to answer. Nor are they just culpable of failing the young priests and religious themselves, but for the terrible and almost unthinkable physical, psychological and spiritual sufferings that they may go on to inflict on others, when failure to find love leads them to seek the “satisfaction” of lust that will destroy them and those others whose lives they will destroy.
What I have written and most particularly, in the final part of this book, is the traditional Catholic teaching on how we who are drawn into the mystical body of Christ can generate the love that will prepare us to be united with him, to experience with him his contemplation of the Father, and how the fruits of this contemplation will first change us, then the Church to which we belong and then the world we are committed to serve.
This essay is chapter twenty-seven of The Primacy of Loving and is published here by gracious permission of the author.
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The featured image is “Portrait of John Collet, currently in the Deanery of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Based on Henry Holland’s print of 1620, based in turn on a sketch by Hans Holbein the Younger, which was not drawn from life but is instead a study of a now lost bust by Pietro Torrigiano (a 16th-century cast survives in St. Paul’s School, London; another cast in in the National portrait Gallery, London). This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.